The Idea in Brief

Many managers would answer “A” to both questions. That’s because real managerial work, with its vagueness, ambiguous accountability, and muddy causal connections, generates intense anxiety. To allay that anxiety, we escape into busyness—handling routine tasks we already know how to do, and avoiding our primary responsibilities:

Improving performance under intense pressure

Demanding more from direct reports

Streamlining daily activities

But when we avoid these responsibilities, the misspent time generates additional pressure and anxiety—making busyness even more seductive.

Most managers spend just 47% of their time on managerial work. Their companies pay the price: too many people on a job, overly complicated structures, excessive analysis, not enough action.

Here’s how to begin replacing anxiety with the confidence essential for tackling your toughest challenges.

The Idea in Practice

Apply these steps continually:

1. Take one step at a time. Break big, amorphous projects into manageable pieces.

Carve off several short-term tasks from ill-defined, long-term behemoths.

A bank’s senior managers were overwhelmed by 50,000 unresolved transactions due to interest rate fluctuations.To more effectively tackle this challenge, they defined two modest initial projects: four-day coverage of 85% of overdraft accounts within 60 days, and collection of fees from other banks whose errors had further delayed processing.They achieved gratifying results.

2. Stick to a narrow path.

For each subgoal, write steps and timetables.

Clarify how you’ll measure, report on, and review progress.

Include just enough detail to stay focused.

These steps reduce time-wasting activities’ allure, give you a sense of control, and ease anxiety. Early successes inspire you to apply these disciplines more broadly.

3. Broaden your scope.

“Capture” other aspects of your work by further breaking ill-defined projects into achievable increments.

Apply steps 1 and 2 to these new pieces.

Example:

After the bank’s two initial projects had progressed, the division managers identified crucial improvement opportunities in their own areas. They then selected one or two projects to produce tangible results most quickly, and prepared written plans for achieving the new goals.

Document your actual use of time—e.g., log time segments in your appointment book.

Ask questions about your three large managerial responsibilities: “Which daily activities are most/least productive? How much time do I spend on innovation? What do I feel most/least confident about asking subordinates to do?”

Combine your insights with other managers’ to identify more effective work habits. One engineering group, discovering they spent 50% of their time responding to routine service problems, decided to help customers on the phone before resorting to more time-consuming field visits.

The news lately has been filled with reports of the need to improve workers’ productivity if the United States is going to compete successfully with the Japanese and the West Germans. Seldom, however, is managers’ productivity mentioned, although the problem of managerial time wasting was recognized as enormous long before anyone thought of quality circles. This problem remains unsolved, the authors of this article say, because most cures focus on the symptoms—long meetings, unnecessary telephone calls, and tasks that could be turned over to subordinates or secretaries. Beneath these symptoms lies the disease: managers’ anxiety that comes with tackling innovative activities. These authors have discovered that three requirements of executives’ jobs—organizing day-to-day activities, improving performance under pressure, and getting subordinates to be more productive—cause so much anxiety that many managers retreat to performing more routine tasks they already know how to do. The authors show how organizational environments permit executives to be unproductive and describe a strategy that can help them to escape these time traps.

You receive a phone call from the president of your company. He asks whether you’d be interested in taking on a special assignment for which you have some unique qualifications. In this assignment you would report directly to him, and you would participate in making some of the important strategic decisions facing the company. The job would also involve some interesting travel. This assignment would allow you to make a valuable contribution to the company and also provide you with major growth opportunities.

The offer has only one catch: because the assignment is part time, requiring about a day a week, you would have to do your present job in the remaining four days. Would you take the assignment?

In the past few years, we have posed this hypothetical question to hundreds of managers, most of whom believed that they already lacked the time to do their jobs properly. Ninety-nine percent of them take the assignment. By doing so, these managers are in effect admitting that, if the motivation were powerful enough, they could eliminate or do in much less time eight to ten hours’ worth of activities each week without negative consequences.

Since most of these people could improve the performance of their current jobs, why don’t they go ahead and free up one day each week to focus on pressing job concerns? Because, if the managers we’ve observed are typical, many of them are not fully in control of the way they use time. Even though they know they should shift their use of time and attend to high-priority problems, the managers we have observed seem to be compelled to keep busy with less consequential matters. Thus, although many executives may rationally acknowledge that they do not use their time as well as they should, they cannot change how they spend it. Why? Our observation is that, to a significant extent, managers spend time performing unproductive, time-wasting activities to avoid or escape from job-related anxiety.

Every manager’s job has aspects to it that trigger anxiety, i.e., psychological discomfort so compelling that the manager has to seek some measure of relief. A manager’s most effective response to this anxiety is to make a direct attack on its source. For example, when feeling uneasy about an upcoming meeting, he or she could devote extra time to getting additional information about the agenda or to testing the agenda in advance with key participants.

Almost all executives, however, escape some job-induced anxiety through a variety of unproductive, often unconscious, psychological mechanisms—such as rationalization, blaming, denial, and so forth. One of the most prevalent and costly of these escape mechanisms is what we call busyness: the escape into time-consuming activities that managers find less threatening to perform (though much less productive) than the tough aspects of their jobs.1

Let’s look at the job requirements that produce much of the anxiety and discuss their effects. Then we will examine ways managers can identify and break out of their time-wasting patterns.

Sources of Anxiety

By observing managers in almost every kind of industry, we have identified three job requirements common to almost all executive levels that often give rise to anxiety. These anxiety-provoking tasks are among the most prevalent sources of busyness we have observed:

1. Managing and modifying one’s daily work patterns and routines.

2. Responding to tough pressure from above to improve performance.

3. Obtaining better results from subordinates.

Planning & organizing day-to-day activities

Most managerial jobs are a blend of familiar routines and innovative activities. In general, people experience more anxiety when they embark on new activities than when they engage in those parts of the job that they have already mastered. We can invoke a Gresham’s Law of Time Management to describe how managers pattern their daily activities: other factors being equal, the desire to avoid anxiety will cause an executive to repeat familiar patterns and shun innovative activities.

Because the effects of this law become ingrained over many years, it is more difficult for managers than for outsiders to see these anxiety-avoidance patterns. Here are a few examples that may strike familiar chords:

The division executive who reads and deals with all of her own mail but doesn’t get around to writing the working paper on the division’s strategic direction.

The production manager who spends half of every day fighting fires on the shop floor but doesn’t have time to work with his staff on production planning and scheduling systems.

The quality control director who wades through the detailed results of every quality trial but can’t find the time to organize much-needed quality improvement projects.

According to a recent survey of over 1,300 managers (including more than 500 presidents and vice presidents), such poor priority setting is common.2 The survey reports that, despite most executives’ long hours, “only 47% of their working time is taken up with managerial activities.” They fill most of the remaining time with hands-on work, what the survey writers term “doing as opposed to managing.” Since many of these managers worked their way up through the ranks of the “doers,” their attention to nonmanagerial tasks may represent a systematic retreat to more familiar and less threatening activities. Completion of these activities becomes the measure of daily success, while more difficult and challenging tasks are squeezed out and remain unmastered.

Improving performance under pressure

Another common anxiety generator is a requirement to produce better results without extra resources. When faced with imperatives such as “reduce inventory,” “increase margins,” “lower costs,” “improve labor relations,” “speed production,” or “upgrade quality,” many managers are uncertain what to do. In fact, most are sure that they’re already doing the best they can with what they’ve got and that further gains will require more (or better) people, a bigger budget, new equipment, or greater support from other functions.

Thus, when many executives hear that they must produce better results without additional resources, they tend to initiate programs without a clear strategy. For instance:

Under pressure from their parent company to reduce inventories, the managers of a high-technology manufacturing company put their systems people to work designing a new inventory control system. Months later they found that, though well designed, the new system had no effect on inventory levels (indeed, they were even higher).

A large manufacturing company was faced with slow growth and dwindling profits. To achieve a turnaround, top management launched a major reorganization that took two years of tremendous energy. At the end of the two years, the new organization was in place—but bottom-line results remained essentially unchanged.

As these examples show, “Action now!” often becomes the unintended pathway to more busyness.

Making demands of subordinates

The third pressure that leads to busyness is the need to negotiate with subordinates for improved performance. For example, all too often bosses allow their staffs to delegate problems upward. As the boss accumulates these delegated problems, he or she becomes increasingly busy.3

Our observation is that this phenomenon often occurs when managers contemplate trying to get subordinates to produce better results or come up with new achievements. Some managers fear that subordinates will argue, pout, quit, or subtly refuse to produce the needed results. To avoid an uncomfortable situation, the manager unconsciously assigns the work in a way that gives the subordinate an escape: “This is an important job; I’d like you to take care of it as soon as you have a chance.”

After a few weeks, during which the subordinate hasn’t yet “had a chance” to do the job, the manager is likely either to do it himself or to explain to his boss why it can’t be done. Similarly, in cases where the subordinate tries to do the job but the manager doubts the person’s ability, managers tend to stay fully involved in the process. Ultimately, two people end up doing the work of one.

Given anxieties like these—which can arise from the real or imagined embarrassments of making demands—it is not surprising that many managers avoid framing sharp, specific, and tough performance expectations for their people. It’s also understandable that they send out to subordinates signals that a good excuse will be almost as acceptable as achieving the result. But by setting expectations that have too much give or have no follow-up, no timetable, or no expectation of truly independent performance, managers become ripe for time problems. They create ways for subordinates to give problems back to the boss and keep them there.

The malevolent busyness cycle

The three job requirements just described are, alone or combined, sources of considerable uneasiness and anxiety for many managers. In order to minimize this anxiety, executives often escape into time-wasting activities like the ones we’ve described. Unfortunately, as managers succumb to carrying out unproductive activities, they neglect their principal goals and purposes. This misspent time eventually creates more frustration, pressure, and anxiety—which generates greater temptations to escape into busyness.

The culture of a work group or management team often reinforces this busyness cycle. Busyness can be contagious. It takes a number of people working together in an unconscious conspiracy to perpetuate too many time-wasting meetings, too much paper and useless information, too many people on the job, too complicated an organization structure, too many studies, and too little action. Once these activities become part of a culture, they can be self-perpetuating.

For these reasons, managers who try to stop using time unproductively will often, after a heroic struggle, find that the system has beaten them and that they cannot single-handedly change their patterns.

Breaking Away

Since evidence suggests that work-related anxiety generates most of the so-called time-management problems and that the organization’s culture often reinforces these problems, no wonder the rational, traditional approaches to time management (such as time charting, time budgeting, and telephone discipline techniques) rarely have lasting impact. Short courses and prescriptive literature on time management produce temporary relief from the symptoms but do little to cure the disease. No matter how fervently busy managers commit themselves to new patterns, work-related uncertainties and anxieties still drive them to slip unwittingly into time-wasting activities. To sustain a reduction in busyness, executives need to attack not only the symptoms but also the source of the problem: the way managers plan, organize, and carry out the key anxiety-provoking requirements of their jobs.

Say a person inflicted with the busyness disease at work is on a weekend stroll by the ocean and sees someone drowning. Most likely that manager—without study groups, meetings, training programs, memoranda, or reorganizations—would toss the drowning person a life preserver. And it is not hard to figure out why.

1. The need is obvious, urgent, and compelling.

2. Accountability is clear, particularly if the person is alone at the scene.

3. The result of the intended action is predictable.

4. The feedback on the effect of the action is immediate.

These same four critical ingredients make work meaningful as well as exciting, plus they allow managers to focus on results and to use time effectively. Unfortunately, management jobs often have an absolute minimum of these zestful characteristics. Goals and objectives are often vague or confused. Accountability is ambiguous. The links between managerial actions today and measurable results later are hard to perceive. And because of ponderous organization procedures, rarely do managers receive immediate reinforcements for achievements.

Because by definition executive jobs are concerned with complex issues and with long as well as short time frames, of course managers can’t become rescuers of organizational drowning victims. Nor can executives always get immediate feedback or see the results of their actions, as a lathe operator can. But managers can do a great deal to infuse zest into the way they respond to anxiety-provoking job requirements at the same time they introduce work-planning and control disciplines that minimize the chances of their escaping into busyness.

2. Block off the busyness escape routes by gradually infusing these projects with work-planning disciplines—such as sharp definition of goals, clear-cut accountability, written work plans, timetables, explicit measurements.

3. After achieving a few modest, incremental subgoals using disciplined attacks, expand and accelerate the process. Attack more goals at once and capture a larger share of the overall job with measured work plans.

4. Then, with other managers, organize a structured effort to analyze use of time and substitute results-producing work for busyness activities. While these more traditional time-analysis steps can’t solve the time-management problem, they can supplement other work-restructuring activities.

Now let’s look at how managers can put this four-part strategy into action.

One step at a time

Managers strike the first blow for liberty when they carve off one or two short-term tasks from an ill-defined array of long-term, anxiety-producing “things that must be accomplished” and set about to achieve their subgoals in a matter of weeks rather than months. The manager should choose a project that is focused on tangible bottom-line results (e.g., reduce scrap X%, increase output Y%, or reduce turnaround time by Q hours) and not on “process” goals (e.g., put a training program in place, get a new inventory system installed, undertake a study, or define a market direction).

For example, the rapid fluctuation of interest rates caused a dramatic increase in the number of transactions that a large bank’s operations division had to carry out, and performance plummeted. In less than a year, the division was forced to write off several million dollars in overdraft interest charges. Also, despite substantial investment in new information systems as well as thousands of overtime hours, it had accumulated a backlog of 50,000 unresolved transactions. To keep on top of the situation, the senior division managers found themselves working endless hours—but the problems accumulated faster than the time in which to solve them. Eventually, the managers decided to tackle two modest first-step projects. The initial goal was to achieve, within 60 days, a four-day coverage of at least 85% of overdraft accounts. The second was to collect a specified amount of “compensation” moneys from other banks whose errors were causing the division delays in processing. Without dropping other efforts, management focused major attention on these two definable projects and achieved gratifying results. By shifting from an amorphous, encompassing view of the objectives to a narrower focus, managers could make a united, effective attack on their problems.

Similarly, an electronics manufacturer struggling on many fronts to control a costly inventory problem decided to concentrate on one category (“shipped but not accepted”) and to produce a specified improvement in 60 days. And in a large teaching hospital, senior medical and nursing officers formed a small team of doctors and nurses that worked together to generate, within two weeks, more accurate methods for predicting the workload of an intensive-care unit.

In none of these cases did the managers abandon or vitiate the overall goal. Rather, as a first step, they hewed off a definable subpart that had more of the zestful ingredients we presented in our “drowning person” example. The projects’ specificity, focus, and short-term nature made it easier for managers to keep energies aimed directly at results rather than scattering them in busyness.

Sticking to a narrow path

The close-at-hand nature of pilot projects makes it possible for executives directing them to introduce more work-planning and control disciplines. Managers need to define and assign each pilot goal clearly, asking those accountable for the projects to produce written work plans (even sketchy ones), concise measures, and scheduled progress reports and reviews.

Unfortunately, many senior people believe that these disciplines make good sense for the work of people at lower levels but cannot be applied to tough managerial tasks. And as long as executives define their goals in sweeping, long-range terms, there’s truth to what they say. More often than not, however, by using this rationalization they avoid confronting the very essence of their work—namely, breaking down complex and abstract issues into discrete pieces. Ironically, when executives creatively and rigorously apply these disciplines to their jobs’ challenges, they not only block the unproductive escape routes but also reduce the anxiety that is the source of this rationalization.

Each of the pilot projects we described was launched with a written memorandum to the people responsible for action. The memo requested each manager to come up with a written work plan that outlined steps and timetables. Methods for measuring, reporting on, and reviewing progress were also created. In the bank operations division, the senior manager even organized a one-day work session in which his department heads could reach a consensus about which goal-setting, work-planning, and review techniques they would use.

These disciplines don’t need to be elaborate, just detailed enough to help managers keep themselves from wandering off the track. Without them, it is all too easy for managers to slip unknowingly into old time-wasting patterns whenever anxiety makes them uncomfortable with the task at hand. But as they commit themselves in writing to specific steps toward a measurable goal, the possibility of drift diminishes. When managers gain a sense of control over their jobs and their anxiety wanes, they become able to apply these disciplines to wider spheres of activity. Their initial successes become springboards for other gains.

Broadening the scope

Once executives have successfully carried out a few focused projects, they can “capture” other aspects of managerial work by further breaking up big, complex, ill-defined goals and projects into achievable, short-term increments—and by organizing them with some disciplined approaches.

Thus, when one inventory category is brought under control, managers can attack additional categories in a similar way. When one production line has made some progress in reducing scrap, others can use the same processes; when one branch office has upped the number of visits per day of salespeople, other branches can apply the same approaches.

In the bank operations division, as soon as the two initial projects were clearly moving ahead on schedule, the manager of the division then asked his people to identify the crucial opportunities for improvement in their own areas. Each manager submitted an extensive list. The senior executive then asked them to concentrate on the one or two areas that would produce tangible results in the shortest time and to submit written work plans for achieving their goals.

Full steam ahead

The final element in our strategy is to analyze and experiment with time usage directly. Managers who supplement the work disciplines just outlined with the more traditional kinds of analysis and experimentation can speed up the process.

We have found two kinds of analysis particularly helpful. The first is objective analysis of how managers actually use their time. For this analysis, managers can effectively use most traditional time-management tools (such as those listed in Exhibit I).

Exhibit I: Traditional Time-Analysis Techniques

Each manager can ask a secretary to keep track of his or her time for a week or two under a limited number of categories.

Managers can make more careful entries in their appointment books, thus using them not only as reminders but also as logs.

Executives can rate meetings according to their effective use of time.

At the end of each day, a manager may spend five or ten minutes (possibly with a secretary or assistant) reconstructing the day and noting key activities, time spent, and other important quantifiable factors.

Analysis of “deliberately planned” versus spontaneous or interrupted time is helpful.

Managers can fill out brief questionnaires about time spent in an average week or month.

The second area to analyze is more personal. Here executives ask themselves questions like those in Exhibit II to launch self-analysis and gain insight into the effects of certain job requirements. The extent to which a manager can discuss these issues with colleagues and superiors will influence the kind of help that he or she can receive. Managers are likely to be uncomfortable sharing this data, and it may take some time before they accept the fact that everyone exhibits some symptoms of anxiety and thus feel free to discuss these issues more openly.

Exhibit II: Questions for Analyzing Time Habits and Patterns

My Daily Routine

Which activities of my day are the most productive?

Which the least?

How much time is spent on each?

How much of each day is simply “lost”—through frittering hours away, interruptions, and so on?

Do I have any daily routines that have not been tested lately for efficiency?

Responding to Challenges

How much of my time is spent on improvement or innovation?

How much on maintenance and fire fighting?

What should the proportions be?

Do I have clearly defined and measurable improvement goals, or are they vague?

When the pressure comes down for better results, do I ever push the “action button” or the “program button” before analyzing what’s really needed?

Asking Subordinates to Meet My Expectations

What do I feel most or least confident asking my subordinates to do?

How well do I convey to my subordinates that they have to produce better results? Or do they seem to have ways of negotiating my expectations downward?

Do I get progress reports at short-interval checkpoints to make sure things are moving in the right direction?

With such analyses in hand, executives can shift their focus to action. They can answer questions such as these:

What activities taking more than 30 minutes a week can you safely eliminate? Select one to eliminate next week.

What tasks that take one hour or more a week could you do in half the time or less? Choose one to reduce next week.

What activities that take 30 minutes or more a week could you delegate completely to a subordinate? Pick one to delegate next week.

After doing this kind of time analysis, engineers in a group working on a customized energy product discovered that they were spending 50% of their time responding to routine service problems—much more time than they should have been taking. This finding led them to shift their work patterns in several ways, such as attempting standard means of helping customers on the telephone before making time-consuming (but psychologically comfortable) field visits.

Individual and group efforts to analyze and reduce time-wasting activities lead to a kind of consciousness raising that facilitates carving off incremental project units and capturing time with appropriate management disciplines. Executives can, of course, supplement these disciplines with administrative procedures such as simplifying forms, focusing and shortening meetings, streamlining communication, and reducing organization layers.

With diligence, executives can create an ongoing process that becomes built into managerial jobs and continues to improve as it ages. But as long as human beings are managing organizations, jobs will have requirements that create anxiety and thus lead to time-wasting activities. Therefore, the strategy we’ve described here must be applied continually. Then the old familiar busyness cycle can reverse itself: success can breed confidence, which in turn can lead to major payoffs in management productivity.

1. For a more complete treatment of managers’ escape mechanisms, see Robert H. Schaffer’s “The Psychological Barriers to Management Effectiveness,” Business Horizons, April 1971; and see Harry Levinson’s HBR article, “What Killed Bob Lyons?” which appeared last in March–April 1981, p. 144.

3. For a revealing and amusing discussion of this phenomenon, see William Oncken, Jr. and Donald L. Wass, “Management Time: Who’s Got the Monkey?” HBR November–December 1974, p. 75.

A version of this article appeared in the May 1982 issue of Harvard Business Review.

Ronald N. Ashkenas is a managing partner of RHS&A. He has written three previous articles for HBR, most recently “Integration Managers: Special Leaders for Special Times” (with Suzanne C. Francis, November–December 2000). The authors can be reached at info@rhsa.com.

Robert H. Schaffer (rschaffer@schafferresults.com) is the founder of Schaffer Consulting in Stamford, Connecticut. He is also a coauthor of Rapid Results! How 100-Day Projects Build the Capacity for Large-Scale Change (Jossey-Bass, 2005).